.......On a very cold morning, Sheriff Peters enters the dreary kitchen of murder victim John Wright’s farmhouse with a man named Hale and the county attorney, George Henderson. With them are the wives of Peters and Hale. After they gather around the kitchen stove to warm themselves, the sheriff asks Hale to recount for Henderson what he saw in the house the previous morning, when he found Wright's body. However, Henderson first wants to know whether anything at the crime scene has been disturbed. The sheriff assures him that everything is the same as it was the day before. He notes, though, that he had sent his deputy, Frank, to the farmhouse earlier to build the stove fire, “but I told him not to touch anything except the stove—and you know Frank."<B>.......Hale then tells his story. While he and a helper, Harry, were on their way to town with a load of potatoes, Hale stopped his wagon at the farmhouse just after eight o’clock to try to persuade Wright to go in with him on a party telephone line. He knocked, thought he heard someone tell him to enter, and went in. He then saw Mrs. Wright in her rocker fidgeting with her apron. She seemed preoccupied. When he asked to see John, she laughed. He repeated his request, and she told him he could not see John. .......“Isn’t he home?” Hale asked. .......She said yes. .......“Then why can’t I see him?” .......“ ‘Cause he’s dead,” she said. .......When Hale asked what he died of, she replied, “He died of a rope around his neck.” .......Hale fetched Harry, and the two men went upstairs and found Wright's body lying on the bed. Mrs. Wright, seemingly unconcerned, said someone must have entered the room during the night and strangled him. She didn’t hear anything, she said, because “I sleep sound.” .......At that point, Hale says, Harry went to the Rivers place nearby to call the coroner, Dr. Lloyd. Meanwhile, Mrs. Wright moved to another chair. Shortly thereafter, Harry returned and a little while later Dr. Lloyd and the sheriff arrived. .......“I guess that’s all I know that you don’t,” Hale tells Henderson.

.......Henderson looks around the kitchen, then opens a cupboard door and finds a sticky substance. The women go over and take a look, and Mrs. Peters says, .“Oh, her fruit; it did freeze,” she tells Mrs. Hale. Then she tells Henderson that Mrs. Wright used to worry that her jars of fruit would freeze and break if the stove fire went out. The men then poke fun at the women for showing concern about the preserves at a time when they are investigating a murder.

.......SHERIFF. Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder and worryin' about her preserves.

.......COUNTY ATTORNEY. I guess before we're through she may have something more serious than preserves to worry .......about. .......HALE. Well, women are used to worrying over trifles.

</B>.......“And yet, for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?” Henderson says, washing his hands. Noting how disorderly the kitchen looks—with its unwashed pans, a dish towel on the table, and the dirty towels with which he wipes his hands—he comments, “Not much of a housekeeper, would you say ladies?”

.......Mrs. Hale points out in Mrs. Wright's defense that there is a lot of work to be done on a farm. .......When Henderson questions her about her relationship with Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Hale says she hadn’t seen the woman in more than a year even though they were neighbors. .......“It never seemed a very cheerful place,” she says. She adds that John Wright wasn’t exactly a cheerful person. .......The sheriff notes that his wife will be picking up some clothes for Mrs. Wright and taking them to the jail. Henderson gives his approval but says he will want to see what she takes. After the men go upstairs to view the crime scene, Mrs. Hale defends Mrs. Wright for “not having things slicked up when she had to come away in a hurry.” She also retrieves a jar of cherry preserves and says Mrs. Wright will feel bad when she finds out it is the only jar of fruit still intact after she worked so hard on her canning. .......After they gather the clothes—including a shawl and an apron that Mrs. Wright requested—Mrs. Hale examines a skirt, then observes that Mr. Wright was a penny-pincher. That may have been the reason that Mrs.Wright kept to the house rather than taking part in local social activities. Before she married John Wright, she says, Minnie Foster wore pretty clothes and belonged to the church choir. “But that—oh, that was thirty years ago.” .......Mrs. Peters says, “Do you think she did it?” .......“I don't think she did. Asking for an apron and her little shawl. Worrying about her fruit.” .......Mrs. Peters says her husband wants to find a motive for the murder, like anger, but Mrs. Hale says she sees no signs of anger. She adds that “it seems kind of sneaking” to lock her up and then come out and go through her house. As they examine piecework that Mrs. Wright apparently planned to use to make a quilt, Mrs. Hale notes, "It's log cabin pattern. Pretty, isn't it? I wonder if she was goin' to quilt or just knot it?" .......Just then, the men come downstairs. The sheriff, overhearing the women's conversation, says, "They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it." The three men laugh. Then they go out to the barn to investigate. .......While the women sit at the kitchen table, Mrs. Hale examines the blocks to be used for the quilt. All had been sewn evenly except one. .......“It's all over the place! Why, it looks as if she didn't know what she was about!” Mrs. Hale says. .......She pulls out some stitches, threads a needle, and begins to finish it properly. Meanwhile, while looking in a cupboard for paper and string with which to wrap Mrs. Wright’s belongings, Mrs. Peters finds a bird cage and asks her companion whether Minnie had a bird. Mrs. Hale doesn’t know, but she remembers that a man was in the neighborhood the previous year selling canaries. Mrs. Peters notes that a hinge on the cage door had been pulled a part. .......“Looks as if someone must have been rough with it,” Mrs. Hale says. .......She puts down her sewing and expresses regret that she did not visit Mrs. Wright in the past year. She says John Wright was an upright man who didn’t drink and was good to his word. However, he was also a “hard man,” she says, “like a raw wind that gets to the bone.” .......Mrs. Hale suggests that Mrs. Peters take the quilting material to the jail with her so Mrs. Wright will have something to do. Mrs. Peters thinks it’s a good idea. When they rummage through the sewing basket for the required material, Mrs. Hale finds a box containing a piece of silk wrapped around a dead bird with a wrung neck. The women are horrified. When they hear the men approaching, Mrs. Hale hides the box under quilting pieces. .......As the sheriff and the county attorney enter, the latter notices the cage and says, “Has the bird flown?” .......Mrs. Hale says she thinks a cat got it, then ran away. .......Henderson reports that there was no sign that anyone broke into the house and that the rope appeared to belong to the Wrights. When he and the sheriff go back upstairs, Mrs. Hale tells Mrs. Peters that Mrs. Wright apparently liked the bird and was going to bury it in the box. It was John Wright who killed it, she concludes, because he didn’t like it—“a thing that sang. She [Mrs. Wright] used to sing. He killed that, too.” Mrs. Peters says, “We don’t know who killed the bird . . . [and] we don’t know who killed him [Wright].” .......To have a bird sing for you in such a dreary house, Mrs. Hale says, must have lifted Mrs. Wright’s spirits. It must have seemed very quiet after the bird died. ......."I know what stillness is," Mrs. Peters says. "When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died—after he was two years old, and me with no other then— .......But she says “the law has got to punish the crime, Mrs. Hale.” Mrs. Hale recalls when Minnie sang in the choir and wore nice clothes. “Who’s going to punish that?” she says, implying that John Wright was responsible for causing Minnie to withdraw from society. .......They decide to wrap the jar of preserves with her other belongings and allow her to think that all of her canned fruit remains intact. When the men come down, Henderson remarks that “everything is perfectly clear” except the motive. The jury will need a motive. Hale reenters from the outside and says the team of horses is ready. Henderson says he will remain behind to study the crime scene more carefully. When the sheriff asks him whether he wants to inspect the items the women gathered for Mrs. Wright, Henderson says, “Oh, I guess they're not very dangerous things the ladies have picked up.” .......At the sheriff's suggestion, he and Henderson check the windows in another room for clues. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hale snatches up the box containing the canary and puts it in her coat pocket. .......When the men return to the kitchen, the sheriff says jokingly, “Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what is it you call it, ladies!” .“We call it—knot it, Mr. Henderson,” Mrs. Hale says..

وهنا short plotThe sheriff, his wife, the county attorney, and the neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Hale, enter the kitchen of the Wright household. Mr. Hale explains how he paid a visit to the house on the previous day. Once there, Mrs. Wright greeted him but behaved strangely. She eventually stated in a dull voice that her husband was upstairs, dead

SettingThe time is the early twentieth century during cold weather. The action takes place in the kitchen of a farmhouse in the American Midwest.

The Title's MeaningsIt refers to the men's view of the women as trifles and their observations as unimportant. It is likely also that the murder victim regarded the bird as an annoying trifle. To Mrs. Wright, it was apparently one of her few sources of joy.

Climax

The climax occurs when the two women discover the dead bird, enabling them envision the events leading up to the murder of John Wright.

Symbols

A- The Bird:

1- A symbol of freedom for Mrs. Wright.2- A symbol of identification.3- A symbol of compensating love.4- A symbol of weakness, submission and loneliness.5. Beautiful last things in the past.6. Bird cage stands for her imprisonment.

B- The Kitchen: 1- A mirror to reflect the psychological choice, confusion and puzzlement.2- Although it is a restricted, limited place for women, it includes a space for women's potention and talents.3- The kitchen stands as a symbol of women's inferiority, while the second floor stands for men's superiority. 4. Jam jar = symbol of Mrs. W. beautiful character. 5. Preserved fruits = symbol of her static life.6. Slavery = humiliation and her hard work (women are not superiority)

أما ـآلمهام والرموز ـآلغير مهنيه يعني رمزو تشويش على ـآلجريمـه

C- The Unfinished Tasks: 1- The bread of the box. 2- The dirty towels. 3- The jam. > "she did not put it in a warm place to keep it from rotting."4- The sewing. > "started neatly and then missed up."All these are Symbols of confusion, unfulfilled life, puzzlement and fear after committing the crime.5- Some unfinished jobs reflect parts of her character and her husband's character.

D- The Clothes:1- The skirt: a symbol of the never regained past; a symbol of the misery she lives in. 2- The apron: usual life and routine; It also represents the psychological upheaval, she was pleating at the apron after committing the crime. Moreover, it is a symbol of slavery. She moved from a small jail to a bigger one, the only different is the prisoners.

E-The sewing: 1. The sewing is a symbol of Mrs. W's confusion and puzzlement. 2. Also it is a symbol of Mrs. W. being a good housewife.

1- Men do not care about details such as the kitchen, towels, bread, bird…etc.Men do not consider the harsh circumstances of being a farmer's wife; they judge Mrs. Wright as unclean just through apparent items. Men cannot predict nor analyze. 1- Women care about details to formulate the big picture. Women recollect the past to understand and to predict the future.Women understand even predictable men, but women are unpredictable. They can analyze."He'll make fun of her."<<Mrs. Peters"But I suppose just to make here feel more natural." <<Mrs. Peters"I might have known she needed help" Mrs. Hale

2- Men believe that women are like children, they are inferior and irrational. >> quote page 1022 "keep an eye out for anything that might be of use to us."<<county Attorney

2- Men in women's eyes are careless, unappreciated creatures, cold, indifferent and think that they are superiors.

3-Males are working separately to get the credit of solving the crime. Men want women to collect evidences as a sign of enslaving them, and then the credit will be purely male. "Keep an eye out for anything that might be of use to us."<<county Attorney 3-Females create a link of sorority.E.g., Mrs. Hale starts cleaning the table and completing what Mrs. Wright did not finish. Because of that, They also connect things together. E.g., They connected the evidences with the reasons and motives that caused them.

*Trifles: "meaning of trifles as shown in the drama" *What are the trifles that formulate the whole picture?!

1- The Bird:Killing the bird leads to the murder of the husband; when the husband killed the bird he killed Mrs. Wright's freedom; so, she killed him in revenge for that.

2-The Dirty Towels and sewing confusion: They reflect the confusion of Mrs. Wright. She was confused because she killed her husband.4- Unfinished tasks:They reflect the confusion of Mrs. Wright. She was confused because she killed her husband.5-skirt and apronIt also represents the psychological upheaval, she was pleating at the apron because she committed the crime.

6- The coldness of the kitchen: They reflect the coldness of their relationship, so this is a motive for her to kill him.7- Connecting between past, present and future.When the women connect between past, present and future, they formulate the whole picture.

8- The little piece of information about John:He was a cold hard unkind man. He liked loneliness and isolation and he was not cheerful. He imprisons his wife. P.1023 " she used to wear pretty…..."In addition, He liked peace and quite. Like when Mr. Hale says:" all he asked was peace and quiet"; so this is can be a motive for Mr. Wright to kill the bird and for Mrs. Wright to kill her husband. He had the upper hand in everything.

9. The Quilt: This is the most important trifle. The quilt showed a disturbance in Mrs. Wright's life. The knotting of the quilt seemed to be the same type of knot used to strangle Mr. Wright. The women noticed that trifle, but the men were too busy looking at the dead body and overlooking the similar knotting of the quilt and of the rope around Mr. Wright's neck. The men though, laugh at the women's wondering about the quilt. To them it is of littlie importance, but at the end of the play they realized its large importance. County Attorney: "Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to--what is it you call it, ladies! Mrs. Hale (her hand against her pocket). We call it knot it, Mr. Henderson.

أمـآ ـآلأدله على أن جون قتل ـآلطير هي ::*The evidences that lead to the fact that John killed the bird are:1. John is a quiet person.2. He likes peace, so he will kill the bird because the bird sings 24/7.3. He prevented her from her friends, so he hates noise.

Female identityWhen speaking to the female characters in Trifles, Henderson and the other men make a key mistake in their assumption that the women derive their identity solely from their relationship to men, the dominant gender. For example, Henderson tells Mrs. Peters that because she is married to the sheriff, she is married to the law and therefore is a reliable follower of the law. Mrs. Peters' response is "Not--just that way," suggesting that over the course of the play, she has rediscovered a different aspect of her identity that ties more closely to her experience as a woman than to her marriage to Henry Peters. As Mrs. Hale concludes, women "all go through the same things--it's all just a different kind of the same thing." For Mrs. Hale, Minnie Wright's murder of her husband is the ultimate rejection of her husband's imposed identity in favor of the memory of the person Minnie Foster used to be.

Law, duty, and justiceBecause Trifles is a murder mystery in which the sleuths decide to hide the evidence of the crime and thus end by aiding the murderer, the play leaves open the question of the meaning of duty and justice. For men such as George Henderson and Henry Peters, the concept of law and order is intricately linked with duty and justice, and at first, Mrs. Peters ascribes to the same interpretation. Consequently, whenever Mrs. Hale criticizes the men for their heavy-handed methods of investigation, Mrs. Peters, who is also the sheriff's wife, apologizes for the men because she sees them as performing their duty. However, Mrs. Hale convinces her that true justice would involve punishing everyone who had neglected and isolated Minnie Wright, and that Mrs. Wright was perhaps justified in her retaliation against her husband. Appropriately, the name of the short story adapted from Trifles is "A Jury of Her Peers," indicating that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters have served as an impromptu jury and have chosen to dismiss the charges in the name of justice and their duty as women.

Patriarchal dominanceIn Trifles, the men believe that they grant female identity by virtue of the women's relation to men rather than through their inherent qualities as females. Except for the absent Minnie Wright, the women have no first name and take their husband's last names, despite being the protagonists of the story instead of the named male characters. This institutionalized male superiority is so pervasive that the men feel comfortable in disparaging Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale's interest in "trifles," with the clear implication that the women are too flighty and small-minded to worry about important issues such as the investigation at hand. In addition, when the men observe the troublesome state of the kitchen, they immediately conclude that the woman must be at fault in her homemaking abilities because they all know John Wright as a good, dutiful man and in consequence form a unified front protecting John Wright's reputation. Because of this male solidarity, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale can only aid Mrs. Wright if they ally with their own gender.

RevengeAfter Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale discover the dead canary in Mrs. Wright's sewing basket, they realize that her murder of her husband did not result solely from her unhappiness in her marriage but from an enforced return to solitude by the killing of her pet bird. Mrs. Wright killed her spouse because she could think of no more fitting revenge than to inflict damage in kind to the perpetrator. This realization catalyzes Mrs. Peters' sense of empathy, as she recalls having had similar feelings many years ago when a boy killed her kitten. For these women, the pain that results from the death of a loved one is so great that it deserves any punishment necessary. Nevertheless, the play leaves open the question of whether Mrs. Wright will still be convicted without the evidence, and similarly we must decide for ourselves if revenge is a sufficient motive for murder.

DomesticityWhen Henderson observes the Wright kitchen, he concludes that Mrs. Wright must not have "the homemaking instinct," which Mrs. Hale interprets as an attack on Mrs. Wright's worth. Her countering of his statement with the suggestion that Mr. Wright did not have the homemaking instinct establishes two alternate interpretations of the meaning of domesticity. According to one definition, domesticity is the ability to keep a home in the purely physical sense, with a clean kitchen and well-sewn quilts. In her final moments prior to the murder of her husband, Minnie Wright rebels against these standards of domestic prowess because in her eyes, her husband has failed to meet the second definition of domesticity, which depends upon one's ability to make a home warm and comforting emotionally. Henderson fails to comprehend that the latter form of domesticity is as important as the first type, as shown by his disregard for signs of a troubled marital life in the Wright household.

LonelinessWhile the need for revenge is the immediate impetus for Minnie Wright's strangling of her husband John, her isolation is the ultimate causes of her unhappiness in their marriage. As Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale note, John Wright was a hard man and did not provide the companionship needed, while Mrs. Hale blames herself for never having visited to offer Mrs. Wright a respite from her loneliness. Both women suspect that the canary had been a substitute for Mrs. Wright's lack of children and other friends, and Mrs. Peters' account of her solitude while homesteading in Dakota suggests that loneliness is an important element of the female and human condition. Mrs. Hale realizes that woman have all experienced loneliness in part because they do not realize their commonality and thus have not learned to unify and support each other. In the end, loneliness connects the women and brings them closer to each other.

Empathy and protectionAt the beginning of Trifles, Mrs. Wright is an unknown quantity whose behavior in Lewis Hale's account is puzzling and bizarre. By the conclusion of the play, however, the substance of her personality and life has been revealed through Mrs. Hale's memories and through a few small details contained on the first floor of her house, and her character becomes the subject of sympathy and finally of empathy. Because Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale come to realize the similarities between the murderer and themselves, they decide that Minnie Wright is worthy of their protection, which has several meanings for the women. Most obviously, they unify with her against the law, as represented by the men of the play, but they also protect her by not telling her the truth about her ruined preserves. In addition, Mrs. Hale regrets not having protected Minnie from isolation and solitude, and she resolves to atone for her inability to protect Minnie earlier by helping her now.

Casting Off Male Oppression

.......In 1916, when Glaspell wrote Trifles, male-dominated society continued to deny women the right to vote and severely limited their opportunities in offices, industries, legislatures, and the marketplace. In the home, the husband was king and the wife a mere vassal. In carrying out one of the most important and demanding tasks in all of society, rearing children, she frequently received little or no help from her spouse. The typical lower- or middle-class wife spent much of her time in the kitchen, cooking, baking, canning, and stoking the stove fire. In "leisure" hours, she sewed, knitted, darned, and quilted. Women who worked outside the home usually held jobs as secretaries, clerks, waitresses, nannies, housekeepers, washerwomen, and manual laborers in factories. There was no minimum wage for these women. Rare was the female physician, lawyer, archeologist, business executive, or professional athlete. However, thanks in large part to pioneering work by women social reformers in the nineteenth century, the women of the early twentieth century began to demand fairer treatment and equal rights. Glaspell's play presents one radical woman rebel, Mrs. Wright, who goes to the extreme to free herself of male domination. It also presents two quiet rebels, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, who side with Mrs. Wright and withhold evidence that the sheriff and the county attorney need to establish a motive for Mrs. Wright's alleged crime.

Women's IntuitionSo-called women's intuition demonstrates its power in this play when Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters discover household items, which the men regard as trifles, that lead to the establishment of a motive for Mrs. Wright's crime. The implication here is that women possess abilities that can complement and augment those of men. A society that limits women's use of their talents is the poorer for doing so.

Irony

Sheriff Peters and County Attorney George Henderson pride themselves on their powers of detection and logical reasoning. But it is the two women, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, who discover the clues and establish a motive amid seemingly innocuous items in the Wright home. The trifles with which the men say the women concern themselves turn out to be the key evidence that the men are looking for. The story ends with an ironic exchange between Henderson and Mrs. Hale.